Involvement of Nurses in Physician Assisted Dying

Death is often preceded by medical end-of-life decisions. Much of the research pertaining to this topic often focuses on the physician's role in assisted dying. There is not much information about the role of other health care workers, especially that of nurses.

A study performed by a group or doctors and nurses, centered around reporting the actual involvement of nurses in medical end-of-life decisions. The research investigated how often nurses were consulted by physicians in the decision making process preceding end-of-life decisions and how often nurses participate in administering lethal drugs in end-of-life decisions.

The study found that physicians consulted at least one nurse in 52% of end-of-life decisions cases occurring in institutions, compared with 21.4% of such cases at home. Nurses administered lethal drugs in 58.8% of euthanasia cases occurring in institutions and 17.2% at home. For cases in which life was ended without the patients request because the patient was too ill to do so, the percentages were 82.7% in institutions and 25.2% for cases occurring at home. In institutions, nurses mostly administered drugs without the attendance of a physician who had prescribed the drugs.

These findings were very surprising to me. I would have thought that nurses would have been more involved in euthanasia cases occurring at home, rather than the hospitals because nurses are often more involved in the home health care setting. The journal article is obviously much longer and detailed, the above facts and figures are just the gist of it.

Reference:

Bilsen, Johan, Robert Vander Stichele, Freddy Mortier, and Luc Deliens. "Involvement of Nurses in Physician-assisted Dying." Journal of Advanced Nursing. 47.6 (2004): 583-591.